Seahawks’ Joey Blount endures, cries, after the killings of 3 of his Virginia teammates

The Seahawks’ plane had just landed home from Germany.

Joey Blount and every other player, coach and staffer had just flown more than 10 hours from Seattle’s game against Tampa Bay in Munich Nov. 13. The rookie safety immediately did what all of us do upon landing from a flight. He turned on his phone.

It was blowing up in his hand.

“We touched down...I was getting all these texts,” Blount said.

The messages on Blount’s phone were frantic ones from his teammates at the University of Virginia, for which he played through last season. They all asked the same thing.

“What happened at UVa?”

While Blount was playing for the Seahawks against the Buccaneers in Munich, some of Blount’s former teammates at Virginia were on a class trip to Washington, D.C.. They attended a play about Emmett Till, a Black teenager murdered in 1955 in Mississippi in a racist attack that led in part to the civil rights movement. As the students’ bus returned from the play to their campus in Charlottesville the night of Nov. 13, Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. allegedly shot and killed on the bus Virginia football players D’Sean Perry, Devin Chandler and Lavel Davis Jr.

Another football player, Mike Hollins, was seriously wounded in the back. A woman also was wounded.

Blount found out from his college group chat of UVa classmates from 2021. Seconds after he landed back in Seattle, he learned his three Cavaliers teammates were dead.

It was three days before Blount’s 24th birthday.

Just-turned 24-year olds aren’t supposed to be enduring what Blount has endured this month.

He spent that week, the Seahawks’ bye week, at his family home in Atlanta “a mess.”

Wednesday, 2 1/2 weeks after the killings of three friends he calls “special,” Blount stood at his locker inside Seahawks headquarters and explained how he’s attempted to cope.

“Trying to (get through), just, day by day, really,” he said.

“It’s not something you can really prepare for.”

When the Seahawks returned from their bye last week, coach Pete Carroll sought out Blount. The impressive tackler with a relentless drive has impressed the 71-year-old coach since training camp. It’s why Carroll chose the undrafted Blount one of the 53 Seahawks to make the team out of the preseason, ahead of a draft pick Bo Melton among other rookies.

Carroll sensed Blount was not ready to practice and prepare for Seattle’s home game last weekend against the Las Vegas Raiders. So, with the team trying to regain first place in the NFC West, the coach excused Blount from the team.

“It was really tough, really tough, very deeply emotional for him to be apart and not being able to be there,” Carroll of Blount and his UVa friends. “We got him out of here last week, so he could get there with enough time to feel that he could connect and bring whatever he could.

“He was really moved by it, deeply.”

Blount said Carroll told him: “Life is more important than football.”

“Pete called me and gave me a leaning and just loving shoulder, to talk about it, just to understand, and listen to,” Blount said.

“He gave me the option to do whatever I needed to do.”

Blount needed to say goodbye to Perry.

After Carroll excused him, Blount was in Miami for Perry’s viewing and funeral last weekend. He flew from Seattle to Miami on Thanksgiving night.

“I wouldn’t say it was to move on, but for my own sake to get closure,” Blount said. “Just so I can cope better — and to also say my last words to him and his family.”

Perry, a linebacker for the Cavaliers and two years younger than Blount, was best friends with a roommate of Blount’s at UVa. The roommate and Perry went to the same high school in Miami, Gulliver Prep.

“I ended up being real close to him, through friendship and my roommate,” Blount said of Perry. “We became close. I ended up taking him under my wing. I share some of the greatest memories with him.

“Him being two years younger than me, I often looked up to him, for what he did in my life. Just his impact, and the way he carried himself.”

Blount took a red-eye flight, six hours, Thanksgiving night from Seattle. He was there Friday for Perry’s memorial service at the Sweet Home Missionary Baptist Church, in the Cutler Bay section of south Miami.

“It was at the viewing. I saw his body. Obviously, when they do his body in makeup they make him all look good,” Blount said.

“During that time was when I saw his dad and I saw his mom.

“I gave them a hug.”

Blount wasn’t sure if Perry’s parents, Sean and Happy, would remember him. He seemed to be tangential acquaintance to them, the college roommate of their son’s high school teammate.

But then Blount learned how much he meant to Perry, from Perry’s father.

“What he told me is something that has stuck with me,” Blount said.

Perry’s father told him inside that church in Miami: “Joey, my son spoke highly of you. He valued his friendship with you. The same way you viewed him, he viewed you back. It was real.”

Those words are Blount’s fuel to drive on.

“As a man, he thanked me for taking care of his son, for always being there for him,” Blount said.

“For me to hear that from his dad, it made that trip all worth it. Flying across the country, that was so worth it, just to know that my love for him was reciprocated — and that he shared that with his parents.

“All three of them, I had special relationships. But D’Sean in particular, he was definitely under my wing. I would take him out to eat. Me and my friend would drive him and his roommate around.

“Just like a little brother — who I ended up looking up to.”

Blount said the entire UVa football program was there for Perry’s services in Miami. He saw and grieved with the Cavaliers’ players, coaches, staffers and administrators.

It was a college reunion Blount never wanted, never could have fathomed he’d have.

“Something my dad always told me was, ‘On-the-job training.’ It’s life, I guess,” he said. “The cards you are dealt, you just have to work with them. But it’s definitely a sad time. It’s very hard on me, personally. Just my connection with those three guys, being only a year removed from the team. All three of them are younger brothers (to me).

“It’s definitely hard. It’s been a hard month.”

The funeral for Perry was Saturday at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Miami. Blount got on a flight Saturday night back to Seattle. It landed after midnight, 12:30 Sunday morning.

Hours later he played at Lumen Field hours, 18 snaps on special teams. He was in for more than half of Seattle’s plays in the kicking game in the Seahawks’ 40-34 overtime loss to the Las Vegas Raiders.

“It was real — just not physically, but emotionally — hard,” Blount said.

“Every time I would step on the field I would just talk to them in my head, say a little word: ‘This play’s for you.’

“I’ve always got them on my mind, even when I’m tired: ‘This rep is not just for me. It’s for other people who prodded me, who wished they could be in my shoes.’”

So Perry, Davis and Chandler are on Blount’s shoes.

He played last week’s game with customized cleats with Virginia Cavaliers orange plus the jersey numbers of Perry (41), Davis (1) and Chandler (15) on the outside of his left shoe. “UVAStrong 1 * 15 * 41” is printed on the outside of Blount’s right cleat.

“We just keep saying: We are stronger together, not as individuals,” he said.

“It was a really emotional game for me,” Blount said. “I was just worn out from all the emotions, and all the crying that I did.”

Carroll said excusing Blount couldn’t make the tragedy any more understandable. But it the time away did the best it could for him.

“I know that didn’t fix anything,” Carroll said. “And I know he came back feeling better about the fact that he was able to connect.”

A bigger cause

This week is the NFL’s annual My Cause My Cleats week. Players from around the league wear in games shoes customized to the cause they support and want to highlight.

Seahawks rookie defensive back Coby Bryant has as his cause one related to what Blount is enduring. Bryant, a Cleveland native, has shoes dedicated to the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence. A childhood friend was killed by a gun.

Running back Ken Walker, another Seahawks rookie, is honoring another one of the three UVa players killed this month. Walker and Chandler went to Arlington High School together in Tennessee, before Chandler transferred for his senior year.

Blount? He is now playing for about 105 young men from UVa each time he takes the field for the Seahawks.

Sunday when he’s running down on kickoffs and punts and making tackles again for the Seahawks against the Los Angeles Rams in Inglewood, California, he will be playing for Perry, Davis and Chandler. And for every Virginia Cavalier.

“Yeah, my prayers are still with them. I think about them every day,” Blount said.

“I just think, the game of football there’s a lot of whys that motivate you to play. Family. Friends. Goals. But for me, my purpose got a lot bigger.

“Because those three young men, their dreams were to be where I’m at. And they couldn’t get there. So I want to make sure that their fires and flames never burn out.”

Blount says he will always be grateful for Carroll and the Seahawks, for what they’ve done these last two, unfathomable weeks.

“Luckily with the club, everybody has been really, really supportive. I am going to lean on them, definitely, during an emotional time,” he said.

“Just thinking about individual times with them,” Blount said of Perry, Chandler and Davis. “You know how it goes...”

His voice trailed off.

A new perspective

Virginia canceled its final two games of the season following the shootings.

Since then, the Cavaliers players and coaches have been to three funerals in five days. From Perry’s service in Miami they flew to Virginia Beach, for Chandler’s funeral. Wednesday they were in Charleston, South Carolina, attending the service for the 20-year-old Davis in his hometown. New England Patriots and team owner Robert Kraft lent their team jet to fly the Virginia team to the funerals.

“For the seniors, and the guys that have been there for a while, it’s rough,” Blount said. “The team was broken. It was broken emotionally. Heartbroken.

“It’s put a halt on football. It’s put a value on, what’s your meaning of life?”